A Gamble with Life

by Silas K. Hocking

Not that the invention on which he had bestowed so much toil and thought was worthless. On the contrary, he saw greater possibilities in it than ever before. But he had been forestalled. Another brain, as inventive as his own, and with far greater facilities for reducing theories to practice, had conceived the same idea and carried it into effect, while he was still painfully toiling in the same direction. When he looked at the work brought out by his competitor in the North, he felt as though there was no further place for him on earth.

"It is better than mine," he said to himself, sadly. "The main idea is the same, but he has shown more skill in developing it."

It was the advantage of the trained engineer over the untrained, of experience over inexperience. He had no feeling of bitterness in his heart against the man who had succeeded; he was of too generous a nature to be envious. The man who had won deserved to win.

He journeyed home like a man in a dream. The way seemed neither long nor short. The first faint odour of spring was in the air, but he did not heed it. His fellow passengers seemed more like shadows than real people. The world for him was at an end. He had no more to do. One question only was left to trouble him. How to put out life's brief candle without awakening any suspicion of foul play. He was more heavily stunned than he knew. Outwardly he was quite calm and collected, but it was the calmness of insensibility. For the moment he was past feeling; it was as though some powerful narcotic had been injected into his veins. He had an idea that nothing could ruffle him any more.

He had fretted a good deal at first over the loss of his good name. It seemed a monstrous thing that any man should have the power to rob him of what he valued more than all else on earth. That Gervase Tregony had deliberately bribed Tim Polgarrow and his own gardener to say he was drunk he had not the least shadow of a doubt, but he had no proof; and to accuse a man of inciting to perjury—especially a man in the position of Gervase Tregony—was a very dangerous thing. So he had to keep his mouth shut, and bear in silence one of the cruellest wrongs ever inflicted upon a man.

He was not at all sorry that he had disfigured the not too handsome face of Gervase Tregony for a few days. Indeed, he was human enough to feel that he would not mind paying another five pounds to be allowed to repeat the process. It was not "the assault" part of the affair that troubled him, nobody thought much the worse of him for that side of the episode. Gervase was not so popular in St. Gaved that he had many sympathisers.

But to be accused of drunkenness, and to have the accusation sworn to, and set down as proved, was as the bitterness of death to him. If there was any vice in the world he loathed it was drunkenness. It seemed to him the parent of so many other vices as well as the Hades of human degradation. It is true he was not a pledged abstainer. He never cared to pledge himself to anything, but in practice he was above reproach.

He knew, of course, why the charge of drunkenness had been tacked on to that of assault, without the former the latter would not hold water. It would be too humiliating to Gervase to admit that a sober man had beaten him in fair fight; hence the fiction that he was pounced upon suddenly and unawares by a man who was mad drunk. But the chief reason lay deeper still. He was not so blind that he could not see that Gervase was jealous of him, and sometimes he half wondered, half hoped, that he had reason to be jealous. It made his nerves tingle when he thought, that in the big house and before the Tregony family, Madeline Grover might have unwittingly let fall some word that could be construed into a partiality for him. It was a thought that would not bear to be looked at or analysed he knew. Nevertheless, it would flash across his brain, and that pretty frequently.